Quote

I think I've always been drawn to the second person. When I was growing up and playing with my friends, the usual way we interacted with imaginary worlds was as characters: a bench was 'your' boat, leaves on a lawn were the fins of sharks out to get 'you.'

Mohsin Hamid

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Mohsin Hamid
Age: 53
Born: 1971
Born: July 23
Novelist
Writer
Thinking
Growing
Worlds
Interacted
World
Friends
Usual
Fins
Character
Drawn
Lawn
Persons
Boat
Bench
Person
Leaves
Benches
Way
Characters
Lawns
Always
Second
Sharks
Think
Playing
Imaginary

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America's strength has made it a sort of Gulliver in world affairs: By wiggling its toes it can, often inadvertently, break the arm of a Lilliputian.
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Novels are make-believe and play for adults.
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A beard is something that is almost like a mirror to the viewer. When someone sees you wearing a beard, they're seeing something in their own imagination because it's still me whether I'm bearded or not.
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Some of my relatives held on to imagined memories the way homeless people hold onto lottery tickets. Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the consequences of their addiction : unserviceable debts, squabbles over inheritances, the odd alcoholic or suicide.
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I felt suddenly very young - or perhaps I felt my age.
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I am a strong believer in the intertwined nature of the personal and the political I think they move together.
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The world seems concerned with Pakistan primarily as an actor in global attempts to combat terrorism.
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When we aren't collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.
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We're all united in this, that every human being migrates through time, that the place we grew up in in our childhood is gone when we're in our 50s and 60s and 70s.
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I think that people are going to move. They always have and that's going to continue. The question is, how are we going to deal with it?
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Love is transient even on a very personal level. We lose everyone that we love. Sometimes we drift apart and sometimes we die.
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It's important to have a non-nostalgic view and say, let's look forward, because if we don't, all we'll hear are voices telling us to go back.
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I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
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Novel writing is the slowest art form in the world. It is not a sprint. It is not even a marathon. It is a series of marathons that stretch over and over across a continent.
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When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain.
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Islamophobia, in all its guises, seeks to minimise the importance of the individual and maximise the importance of the group. Yet our instinctive stance ought to be one of suspicion towards such endeavours. For individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion.
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We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves.
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Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.
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Why the brevity? Because I'd rather people read my book twice than only half-way through
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The paralysis that we have right now when we think about migration is partly because we can't imagine what the world would look like in the future. So I think it's important for writers and artists to try to imagine that.
Mohsin Hamid